Lexical activation produces potent phonemic percepts

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Psycholinguistics
• Auditory Perception

Background:

• Auditory word recognition models debate autonomous (bottom-up) versus interactive (top-down) processing.
• Understanding how lexical information influences sound perception is crucial.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate top-down lexical influence on phonemic perception during auditory word recognition.
• To provide evidence for interactive models of word recognition.

Main Methods:

• Listeners labeled speech sounds (/bI/-/dI/) after adaptation to various sounds.
• Adaptation effects were measured before and after exposure to real words and perceptually restored words.
• Control conditions isolated the effects of lexical activation and phonemic restoration.

Main Results:

• Real words and perceptually restored words containing target phonemes induced adaptation shifts in labeling.
• Adaptation was dependent on phonemic restoration, not solely on lexical activation.
• Control conditions showed no adaptation without phonemic restoration.

Conclusions:

• Lexical activation can drive the perceptual synthesis of phonemic codes.
• Findings strongly support interactive models of auditory word recognition over purely bottom-up accounts.